Something New
(I wrote this three martinis deep)
You can never imagine something new. A place, a skill, a habit, a person. I’m trying to imagine cooking for someone new – telling them that we can eat it out of the pan, perched on the edge of the counter, the remnants of ingredients strewn across the room. But I can only imagine the previous versions of him, like the him who sat opposite me on a Sunday in October and opened a bottle of Moët we’d bought from the corner shop because 6 hours earlier he had whispered “I think I’m falling in love with you” under the covers, although I think I only heard three words and ran with them for two years. Or the him that undressed me after three pints of Guinness at my favourite pub. Or the man who walked into my kitchen and realised I wasn’t that 24 year old girl anymore, even though we were playmaking our youth the whole day.
I think of romance in terms of meals cooked. How many dates does it take to get to a whole brined chicken roasted over rice eaten at the counter? The pizza from across the street eaten sat on the floor with a bottle of cheap red wine? What about the creamy vodka pasta that trembles in its sauce? Or the softly folded golden eggs taken off the heat that we eat like a picnic under the sheets?
I try to imagine new recipes but recipes are only ever half new: they’re layers of other people’s family, heartbreak, first love, grief, holidays and everything else that comes with making a meal. Everything is a version of something else but to be known you must make that version your own. No pressure.
I wonder if, for me, sex and cooking are equal in their performances of vulnerability. I would be afraid to cook for someone on the first date; to let them into the kitchen and notice all of my bad habits. I wonder if, for them, it starts as something new; and then after more dates and more time and more meals, it ends up being just a part of me that becomes another reason to leave.
When there’s a tear to sew up, however minuscule, I must do two things. First, we drink: a glass of minerally white that tastes like the Earth; or something light and red and chilled that tastes like sour cherries; and when the tear feels more like a rupture, vodka salted with olive brine, 50/50, don’t even bother with the vermouth. Next, I cook. Something old. Nothing new. Something borrowed. Something to stop me feeling blue.
Newness scares me where novelty doesn’t. Perhaps the latter implies a temporariness; the former the beginning of something true. I tell myself I must get better at cooking new recipes and reading new books, instead of falling back on well-versed tastes because you always know what’s going to happen next. Even if I repeat the actions in the wrong order, or miss an ingredient or two, you know where the dish is going to end up. It’s not predictability as much as it is comfort.
I’m leaving London for four nights and imagine the sum total of my cooking will be layering butter cut as thick as cheese onto crusty baguettes with paper-thin slices of ham. Will I return and feel called to make a bouillabaisse or simply come home and turn the rice cooker on?
When the subheader tells you something different on the second read xx